Critical Zones Africa (CZA) is funded through the generous support of the Science for Africa Foundation.
The landscape therefore presents sets of complex relationships that challenge ideas embedded in modernist planning and governance of cities through grid lines, infrastructures and technologies which the state claims an illusory power to command, control and predict flows of leachate and toxins, keeping them separate from people and environments. The dominant cosmologies of environmental management, particularly in urban spaces such as a Cape Town, is consistent with the neoliberal ideas that see nature as a suite of “ecosystem services”, which humans can extract resources from (nature as an ATM), or use as sinks for waste. These ideas emerged from twentieth century city planning and engineering and methods of technocratic conservation which prioritised expert natural resources management to ensure maximum beneficial utilisation. Keeling (2005: 1) argues that controlling pollution and environmental conservation were associated with the notion of “assimilative capacity”, a concept used by engineers to describe the ability of a body of water or landscapes to take in, dilute and disperse household, agricultural and industrial waste. By using quantitative modelling of the environment, engineers in charge of sanitary and waste networks proposed the inclusion of natural biophysical processes into the technological sewer networks (in the case of wastewater), and landfill sites (in the case of solid waste) (Keeling, 2005). However, the pollution generated in Cape Town is not transported to an ‘empty’ space, nor is it ever possible to do so. Neither the dilution of waste nor attempts to hide waste in water and soil prevent human and ecological health problems from flows of pathogens and contaminants.
Our work therefore seeks to understand how this representation of society and nature as separate “systems” limits the understanding of urban metabolisms, and their entanglement with bio-geo-social processes. This will be explored through the following topics:
- Extracted Landscapes: Sand Mining, Small-scale farming: soil/sand, water and seed care to address emerging climate-based struggles
- Infrastructure Studies: assessing politics, technologies, economics and lived experience in relation to infrastructure; energy, water and ecological infrastructure
- Contaminant legacies and environmental justice: visible and invisible contaminants in waterways – PFAs and pesticides; towards CZ-based policy on contamination management
- Multispecies studies: Strandveld plants as a connector between water, sand, biodiversity and air; Strandveld in the protection of migrating sand dunes and sea level rise; Fortress conservation; toward Critical Zone-based environmental governance policy
- Solid waste studies: tracing the movement of solid waste in the critical zone, from households to landfills to farmland – sludge, plastics, microplastics; towards policy on solid waste management and circular economies
The aim is to engage with local and national government as well as local communities and NGOs in the co-development of alternatives, for waste management, city planning and environmental governance, that are attuned to what makes for habitable worlds in landscapes that still carry the ruins/debris of apartheid and colonial spatial planning. In addition, the study aims to contribute knowledge to Critical Zones scholarship, providing evidence of what it means to think of the critical zone outside of the “pristine”, in contaminated landscapes, politics and the messiness of everyday life.
Research team
Principal Investigator (PI) = primary contact for the site
Research fellows
Graduate cohort
Site partner
